Read Chapter 37: The Pursuit of Fault

The wind had teeth now.

Élise felt it bite through the shell of her jacket as she crouched beside Bastien, whose ankle had swollen to the size of a small melon inside his boot. His face was pale beneath the grime, his breathing shallow but steady. He watched her with those eyes she still couldn't place—somewhere between defiance and something softer she didn't trust.

"We can't leave him." She said it before anyone else could. The words were already out, hanging in the thin, cold air.

Luc stood a few paces away, his ice axe planted in the snow like a flag of belonging. His jaw worked beneath the stubble. "Élise, we have Marc on a makeshift sled. We have a wind shift coming. We have—"

"I know what we have." She stood, feeling the ache in her own knees from three hours of breaking trail. "He's the only one who knows the extent of the sabotage. If he dies out here, the diary is just a dead man's story. No corroboration. No confession."

"He already confessed." Luc's voice was flat. "To triggering the avalanche."

"Under duress. In front of a group that wants to string him up." She held his gaze. "That won't hold. You know it won't."

The tourists had clustered together downwind of the ridge crest, their faces pinched with cold and fear. Yasmine had taken charge of Marc, who lay strapped to the sled, his broken leg splinted with ski poles and bandages. The old man's eyes were closed, but his chest rose and fell with regularity.

Sophie, the youngest of them, was crying silently. Her cheeks were striped with frozen tears.

Luc's voice dropped low enough that only Élise could hear. "He tried to kill us. He triggered an avalanche that nearly took you off that cliff. He tampered with the map. He's the reason we're out here at all."

"And he's the reason we're alive right now." She stepped closer, close enough to see the cracked skin on his lips, the exhaustion buried in the lines around his eyes. "If he doesn't survive to answer for it—to tell us who else was involved—then the ones who stay hidden will just do it again. Someone else's mountain. Someone else's tour group."

Luc's silence lasted long enough that the wind filled it.

Then he nodded once. Sharp. Professional. The pilot's version of surrender.

"We rig a drag line. He's not going on the sled with Marc—that sled can barely hold one." He turned to the group. "Delacroix. Singh. You're on the injured. We'll pull Bastien on a second makeshift travois. Ropes and packs, we can make it work."

Élise was already unclipping her pack. "I'll set the line."

---

They moved slow. Agonizingly slow.

The ridge ran along the col like a spine, exposed on both sides to the rising wind. Snow rattled across the surface like thrown gravel, reducing visibility to less than thirty meters. Élise led, setting a careful rhythm, testing each step with her ice axe before committing her weight.

Behind her came the scrape and hiss of the travois. They'd lashed Bastien to a frame of ice axes and trekking poles, his injured ankle elevated, his torso strapped to the frame so he wouldn't be dragged by the rough ropework. He'd stopped speaking after the first hundred meters—whether from pain or shame or something else, Élise couldn't tell.

Luc brought up the rear, his gaze constantly sweeping the slope above them. The cornice hung out of sight beyond the ridge crest, but they could all feel it. A weight of snow and time, waiting.

"We're too exposed." His voice came through the wind, clipped and urgent. "We need to drop below the ridgeline."

"There's no drop." Élise pointed right, where the slope fell away into a steep, ice-glazed chute. "Not until the saddle. Half a kilometer."

"We won't make half a kilometer at this pace." He'd drawn up alongside her, and she could see the calculation in his face. The same math she was doing. They were moving at maybe a third of the speed they needed.

The snow beneath Élise's boot gave slightly.

She froze. Studied the surface. The slope had loaded overnight—she could see it in the way the recent snow sat proud of the old crust, waiting for a trigger. They were treading along the edge of instability, and two wounded men meant they couldn't afford even a moment of error.

"Split the group," she said. "Get the tourists ahead while we—"

"No." Luc's hand was on her arm. "We don't split. Not now. Not with Bastien still unaccounted for."

"He's strapped to a travois. He's not going anywhere."

"He talked to Pfeiffer. We don't know who else he talked to." Luc's eyes scanned the group, landing on each face in turn. "We stay together until we hit the valley."

Élise wanted to argue. The math said splitting was safer—moving the uninjured ahead while the rescuers managed the slow, painful work of dragging the wounded to safety. But Luc wasn't wrong. They'd been wrong about one person already. Wrong enough to nearly die for it.

She pressed her lips together and turned back to the ridge.

They made it another two hundred meters before the slip.

Luc had shifted the travois from Delacroix to himself, taking point on the drag while Élise scouted ahead. The rope went taut against his harness, and Élise heard it—the small, wet sound of his ice axe biting into something wrong.

She turned in time to see Luc lurch sideways.

His arm swung wide. The ice axe—his main anchor in the steep, crowned slope—had popped free of the brittle surface snow. He was already falling, his weight pulling the travois and Bastien with him.

Élise didn't think.

She dove. Hit the snow on her knees, drove her own axe deep into the crust, wrapped the rope around her forearm twice, and locked off.

The shock came through the line like a live wire. Her shoulder wrenched. Something in her elbow screamed. But the rope held.

Luc hung at the edge of the slope, his boots scrabbling for purchase on the frozen snow. Below him, the chute dropped into a white void. The travois had slid sideways, Bastien's face bloodless as his frame tilted toward the abyss.

"Grab the rope!" Élise shouted. Her voice came out ragged, wind-bitten. "Grab it, Luc!"

He found it. His gloved hand closed around the line, and she felt the extra weight settle as he pulled himself up hand over fist, finding edges in the slope that no one else would have seen. The pilot's instincts. The rescue training.

He crested the ridge and collapsed beside her, breathing hard.

For a moment they just lay there, chests heaving, faces close enough that she could feel the heat of his breath on her frozen cheek. His hand was still wrapped around the rope—the same rope that went through her locked-off harness—and his knuckles were white against the nylon.

His eyes found hers.

And for a moment, the wind stopped mattering. The injured men, the hourglass of the coming storm, the weight of the diary in her pack—all of it fell away to the simple fact that he was alive and so was she and they were still tethered to each other.

"Thank you," he said. The words came out rough, scraped raw.

She nodded. Didn't trust her voice.

His free hand came up, brushed a strand of ice-crusted hair from her forehead. The touch was featherlight, almost hesitant. Like they were strangers still learning the shape of each other's faces.

"We make it out of here," he said. "We talk about us. Properly."

The wind gusted. Somewhere above them, the cornice creaked like a ship's hull in deep water.

"We make it out," she agreed.

Behind them, Bastien let out a low moan of pain. The spell broke.

Luc pushed himself upright, pulled his axe free of the crust, and moved back to the travois. But before he turned away, he caught her eye again. Something passed between them—a promise that didn't need words.

Élise stood, checked her harness, and looked toward the col.

The saddle was still four hundred meters away. The wind was shifting. And behind them, in the snow where Luc had fallen, she caught a glint of something buried.

She moved closer. Kicked at the crust with her boot.

A metal plate, chipped and corroded. Wires poked from a broken casing. It looked like—

"Élise." Luc's voice, sharp. "What is that?"

She knelt, brushing away the loose snow. The device wasn't larger than a paperback book. But the casing was stamped with a logo she recognized.

The same logo that appeared in the dead climber's diary.

The same logo Pfeiffer had worn on his jacket in the photo that had been clipped to the page.

"It's a seismic trigger," she said slowly. "Motion-activated. It would almost certainly set off a second avalanche."

Beside it, half-buried, lay a second device. Then a third.

Someone had seeded the route.